31-Point Warlock Talents

So the new 31 point talent trees were released today and are available in Beta. It has been stated that the warlock trees are far from finished, and after playing with the talent calculators a little bit I’m glad to know they are going to be taking another pass at them. You can read my full comments behind the cut, but the TL; DR version is that they are moving the direction of less variation in the passive parts of the game, like talent choices, and much more variation in the actual game play. The trees are a mess at the moment, but its still worth looking at them to guess at future intentions.



At Level 10, you are asked to choose a specialization and invest your first talent point, at which point you are given a new, spec-specific spell, as follows.

Warlock - Destruction
Calls down demonic fire to burn and demolish enemies.
* Conflagrate
* Destruction Warlock (+hit, pushback reduction)

Warlock - Demonology
A warlock who uses both Fire and Shadow magic along with powerful demons.
* Summon Felguard
* Demonology Warlock (+hit, pushback reduction)

Warlock - Affliction
A master of Shadow magic who specializes in fear, drains and damage-over-time spells.
* Unstable Affliction
* Affliction Warlock (Bane and Curse GCD = 1sec, +hit, pushback reduction)

      This in my mind is a very fun addition. We may hear a little grumbling from some old schoolers who think you should have to wait to have access to these previously high-tiered spells. But each of these three spells well fulfill Blizzard’s desire for low level players identify with their spec early. Depending on the class, this identification previously took quite a bit of time. Warlocks, for instance, level all the way to Outlands with their Voidwalker, and the damage dealing “rotation” doesn’t change until you pick up Unstable Affliction. For leveling purposes, one spec has much the same flavor as another. The new mechanics will change this mindset a lot. Demonology warlocks will have the extremely visible Felguard, Affliction warlocks will forget about Fire Damage altogether, leaving Destruction with the biggest nuke. 
    
In paring down 71-point trees to 31-point trees, we obviously lost quite a bit. We also gained some very interesting talents.

Affliction 
The Affliction play-style has been the most differentiated of the warlock specs, but the talent tree for Affliction included a lot of unimaginative damage increasing talents. Pretty much all of these have gotten the axe, including Shadow Mastery, Contagion, and Malediction. We also lost Fel Concentration, Grim Reach, and Improved Felhunter. Suppression and Amplify Curse are also gone, but will be included in the Affliction Specialization bonus. Pandemic is changing from allowing Corruption and Unstable Affliction crit for 100% increased damage to automatically refreshing them when the target is affected with Drain Soul. This will make the Affliction execute phase much cleaner, as you will only have to break your Drain Soul channel for Haunt. 
A lot of the talents we are losing, however, will disproportionately affect Corruption more than any other spell. At the moment, Corruption is the lock’s strongest DoT, this is going to lose a lot of the meat. 
       While all of these changes are very logical, the Affliction tree itself is a mess right now. It currently only has 35 points available, and to get to the top of the tree your are forced to take inane talents like Improved Fear/Howl of Terror, which obviously wont be the case when this goes live. I think the additional talents will be for pet damage, as Affliction is currently the only tree without any pet talents. Moreover, the only talents available in early Tier Demo or Destro are for the Imp and Succubus’s Seduction, neither of which are lend much aid to Affliction for flat damage. Throughout WotLK, Affliction has used both the Succubus and the Felhunter, and I wouldn’t mind having the choice between the two based on talents. I don't think I’ll miss the spell coefficients being artificially enhanced, either. I recently did some math on Nevermelting Ice Crystal that made my head explode. Please keep them away. 
       I have mixed feelings about moving Shadowbolt into the Affliction tree, which might help fill in a few of the talent points here. On the one hand, given how you will be forced to spend 31 talents in one tree before doing anything else, it does not make a lot of sense not to have access to it. It also is certainly not doing Destruction any good. I think as long as you only have two spam bolts and three trees, one of them is going to have to be off spec. I am not not so sure it should. It is shadow damage, it scales with Affliction’s DoTs. What classifies it as Destruction? Clearly not the fact that it is direct damage, because Immolate, a DoT, is also classified as Destruction. On the other hand, moving it would leave a gap for another Tier 1 talent, because Demonology uses it to get to Soul Fire. It would also leave Destruction rather weak for leveling, because while Affliction talents beef up your DoTs a little more, Destruction relies more heavily on nukes. Blues have said they want it to stay where it is, and I am a wimp who likes to side with the establishment. I am fine with it where it is currently in our 71-point trees, but I think this would be a good time to revisit the issue.

Demonology 
     Whoa there, DemoBitch! Demonology got some unexpected awesomesauce. Hello, Hand of Gul’dan! Improved Hellfire! Talents involving our soul shard related abilities are gone. We lost some fun parts, like Demonic Knowledge, which was part of what made Demonology so viable, but the losses in this tree are largely trivial. 
       As promised, Soul Link was placed early enough in the tree that any PvP warlock should be able to pick up this talent. The talk of the town is going to be the new spells: Hand of Gul’dan, Improved Hellfire, and Cremation. Hand of Gul’dan is, in a word, awesome. It’s no Army of Infernals, but hell, I’ll take it. From the current build, it is looking like you will absolutely pick it up, it won’t be an afterthought like say, Shadowfury currently is for Destruction. You further improve it with Improved Hellfire, which answers everyone’s questions about Blizzard’s assertain that Hellfire, not Rain of Fire, would be valuable to Demonology Warlocks. Being able to cast Hellfire on the run will likely get a lot of use, given the hints we have been getting about future raid fights being more movement heavy rather than stationary. Being loaded down with either dots or cast times makes warlocks handicapped on such fights, so this is a welcome and, hell, I’ll say it, sexy option. This totally makes up for taking away our ability to save ourselves a repair bill. The final improvement to this tree is Cremation, which will auto-refresh Immolate with Hand of Gul’dan. I particularly like that Hand of Gu’dan is shadow damage, which further blends fire and shadow in Demonology. Well played. 
       The Demonology tree is the largest at the moment, but that is likely because the inclusion of new spells caused a good deal more though to go into this tree. Not nearly enough however, as you still are forced to spec into things like mana reduction to get deeper into the tree. (The other choices are the imp or the succubus, both of which are off-spec talents. Demonology will always use the Felguard.) In my opinion, mana reduction should be eliminated entirely from a warlock’s choices, because Life tap makes such talents redundant. Arguably helpful, because they can reduce the number of global cooldowns you use life tapping, but give me a damage dealing, soul rending talent any day. You also have to skip the fun talents of Improved Hellfire and Cremation to be able to pick up Improved Soul Fire in the Destruction tree, so I think we still have some re-working to do here. 
       The Demonology improvements are very exciting for a tree so long neglected. I consider myself a born Affliction warlock, but I very much enjoyed Destruction when it was King. Demonology has never been appealing to me, and since its damage had never been comparable, I never felt the need to overcome that prejudice. Its playstyle lacks the sophistication of Affliction, and it is not nearly as satisfying a face-roll spec as Destruction. Its main use comes from its raid-buffing roll, which you only need one warlock to fulfill. But these new changes are very exciting, they might actually make Demo fun to play! Its too soon to guess what the rotation will look like, but if Cremation is a regular talent choice, we will probably take it to save time casting Immolate, and (presumably) do more damage that Felflame, which will also refresh Immmolate. I never thought I would seriously be interested in Demonology.

Destruction 
       Destruction also lost a lot of its straight "Increases damage/crit" effects. We also lost Molten Skin and Pyroclasm, which is disappointing. This could potentially change the rotation a little, moving Chaos Bolt further to the front end now that we will no longer be hoping for a proc. There are a few really interesting new talents in the tree, which I hope are here to stay. Improved Soul Fire will increase your haste after you cast Soul Fire, when the target is above 80%. A kind of opposite of the normal "execute" phase. This has the potential for a DPS advantage because it will last longer than the Affliction and Demonology execute range, as so many classes have execute abilities that the last 25% is usually the shortest, and also a very popular time for Bloodlust. I had thought that the new Shadowburn mechanics, where it hits for additional damage if the target is below 25%, were setting up Shadowburn as the Destruction execute ability (which it still probably will be, though on a long cooldown) so this is a surprise, and I'll be interested to see if it works out. The 15 second effect with a 30 second cool down on an ability that already has a very long cast time will be difficult to balance in comparison to the damage lost from your regular rotation. 
       The other "reverse style" spell warlocks have picked up is Bane of Havoc which has been described as a reverse (weak) Beacon of Light. It's been listed in the talent tree on the Beta for ages, but is STILL not yet implemented. This talent will have fun, if situational uses. Very predictable and easy to use. Afterburn is our last new spell, which combines your damage with your Imps in a way we haven't seen before. 
       Once again however, we see that the tree is poorly built. If the goal is allow you to pick up all (or most) of your damage talents and then let you choose your utility talents, Blizzard has a lot more work than they think, and they should enlarge the talent trees further. Maybe not all the way to 71, but we need a lot more wiggle room. 


Overall, I am very excited by the direction the changes are making. Blizzard got it right when they said that talents the increase your damage at a flat rate aren't a real talent choice at all, and spell-specific talents just confuse new players. I think every single one of the new spells are geared towards widening the warlocks "arsenal" which is something I wholeheartedly support. Priority systems are more interesting than rotations, and fights that will actively require you think just to fulfill your DPS role are even better. Choosing your talent points should be the easy part, learning how to play with your abilities -- not just your spells -- engages you more fully in all kinds of encounters. These trees, even for a rough pass, need a lot more hustling than Blizzard has admitted. There is not yet enough "wiggle room." At the moment, you really are only given the choice to skip one or two things, when there are at least four that wont be interesting to you. If Blizzard is committed to these 31 point trees, my suggestion would be to free up a few talent points by making talented abilities -- like Chaos Bolt, Shadowfury, Haunt, etc, trainable. Talents can make them better, but we shouldn't resent points spent to get to the top of the tree when we have so few points to spare.